Friday, March 2nd, 2007
Immigrants are less likely to go to prison than U.S.-born residents of the same ethnic group and they boost pay for natives, research says. By Teresa Watanabe, Times Staff Writer
February 28, 2007Two new studies by California researchers counter negative perceptions that immigrants increase crime and job competition, showing that they are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born citizens and actually help boost their wages.
A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.
UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates, because immigrants generally perform complementary rather than competitive work.
As immigrants filled lower-skilled jobs, they pushed natives up the economic ladder into employment that required more English or know-how of the U.S. system, he said.
“The big message is that there is no big loss from immigration,” Peri said. “There are gains, and these are enjoyed by a much bigger share of the population than is commonly believed.”
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Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
(Baltimore Sun Opinion > op/ed) By E. G. Vallianatos
Originally published February 22, 2007
The tale is familiar by now, but that makes it no less horrifying: Migrant men and women, most of them from Mexico and Central America - along with some poor blacks and whites from the United States - following the growing and harvest seasons, working hard for pitiful wages while enduring dangerous lives.
In 1979, I was a new Environmental Protection Agency employee attending a government-funded seminar about the plight of farm workers. Expert after expert described conditions of horror. The threat came from farm sprays - the farm workers’ worst enemy. Many farm workers didn’t understand the instructions on the pesticide can or the advice of the farmers on when to enter sprayed fields. Sometimes workers were sprayed while harvesting crops, but most often the workers harvested crops with the toxin still on the leaves and fruit.
More than 25 years later, little has changed.
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Thursday, February 1st, 2007
Sean Sellers
sean(a t)sfalliance.org
Wed, 31 Jan 2007
Mr. Mallaby,
In your recent article, “Winning Hearts and Stomachs” (Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2007), you write that McDonald’s has, “teamed up with the University of Miami to improve conditions for tomato pickers….”
I would like to direct you to the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (www.ciw-online.org), an internationally- recognized, award-winning human rights organization comprised of the very workers that pick McDonald’s tomatoes. The CIW won a four-year national boycott against Taco Bell in 2005, which is what initially alerted McDonald’s to the labor abuses in its tomato suppliers operations. But instead of working with the CIW to expand the important Taco Bell agreement throughout the fast-food industry, McDonald’s instead partnered with agricultural industry lobbyists, attempting to undermine the fragile precedents for change. At this point, this story has been well documented by journalists, scholars, and the workers themselves.
Just within the last week, two stories have broke that completely shatter McDonald’s pretense of social responsibility in its tomato supply chain. You can read both of these stories at www.ciw- online.org/news.html
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that McDonald’s efforts with the University of Miami are more about PR than actually improving working conditions for tomato pickers. For this reason, McDonald’s can expect more controversy and negative publicity in the weeks, months, and possibly years ahead.
Sincerely,
Sean Sellers
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Winning Hearts and Stomachs: Hostility to America, but Lines at McDonald’s
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/28/AR2007012801048.html?referrer=emailarticle
By Sebastian Mallaby Monday, January 29, 2007; A15
Last week brought fresh evidence of America’s fallen standing in the world: The BBC polled 26,000 people in 25 countries and found that less than a third regard U.S. influence as positive. But one symbol of America — a more enduring one than President Bush, by far — provided some more cheerful news. McDonald’s reported its strongest business results in three decades, and brisk sales in supposedly anti- American countries were a large part of the reason. More…